How Blade: Trinity became Marvel's biggest disaster

As 'Deadpool & Wolverine' pokes fun at the the pre-MCU era of comic book movies, Adam White explores the tortured production of the final Blade film - from an allegation of strangulation to the long-lasting feud between its stars

- Adam White

In the autumn of 2003, a motley crew of the nearly famous and the famously kooky assembled in Vancouver to shoot a comic book film. One was an erratic leading man on his last legs as a movie star. Two were pleasingly dull twentysomethings who'd been anointed Hollywood's next big things. Another was an actor in the midst of a near-fatal personal crisis. Also milling around Canada after dark were a WWE wrestler, an ageing country-and-western legend, and the coolest indie-movie actor of the Nineties, who'd prepared for the film by running errands in New York wearing vampire fangs.

This unlikely ensemble - Wesley Snipes, Ryan Reynolds, Jessica Biel, Natasha Lyonne, Triple H, Kris Kristofferson and Parker Posey, respectively - were making Blade: Trinity, a doomed franchise-capper that would unexpectedly serve as the blueprint not only for the worst impulses of the Marvel Cinematic Universe but of Reynolds's future career.

That anyone is even thinking about Blade: Trinity this week is because a new film gestures right back at it: of the many top-secret cameos in Marvel's Deadpool & Wolverine, it's Snipes's return as Blade that is the most surprising. He joins a number of other faces from Ye Olde Marvel to appear, all of whom are asked to grapple with their aborted franchises and/or general unpopularity in fan circles.